Surprised no one has (at least so far) in this long thread mentioned Feynman's books. Those were the real mind-benders for me. Absolutely made me think differently about myself and my place in the world.
Not directly a website, but I never get a chance to talk about these so: I miss old AOL text-based games. There was an early RPG called Modus Operandi that I loved beyond words.
I miss random synchronous chats with strangers, but I think I liked them because the stranger pool was a lot less creepy. I'm not sure I would enjoy them now.
FWIW, someone I met doing random AOL profile searches in the mid-'90s and I are still online friends. We both liked the Dave Matthews Band and played varsity tennis, and this met my minimum chat requirements. Now we are both former journalists working online, dealing with bipolar disorder and the recent death of a parent. The internet might be weird sometimes, but that (and a random story of getting a web development job because someone had the wrong email address for the person they were actually trying to hire) will always go down in my "Internet wins" column.
I miss it in a nostalgic way too. Obviously we’re all >20 years older now and I don’t think I’d even have the time for it (I barely have time to read HN most days.) But yeah, the fact that most normal people online were doing it then meant you could really connect around shared interests. Nowadays, I assume if you’re talking to strangers you’re a weirdo or looking for something creepy because “A/S/L?” was creepy. Part of the reason I feel the internet is safer for kids these days, they’re only talking with real life friends for the most part or engaged in a voyeuristic behavior (celebs, influencers, etc)
FWIW, I have a couple friends like that. We bonded over some musical interests of our teens and occasionally check in on each other although most never met in real life. Maybe that’s still happening in game chat? But I can’t imagine something like yahoo chatrooms still exists.
I had TOTALLY forgotten him/his sites but holy crap. Looking that up on the Wayback Machine is a rabbit hole I don't have time to fall down today but I really want to. If I remember right, I found him in a link roulette-type thing from someone else's Geocities page.
Let me be real: I loved Geocities and Angelfire. I liked seeing what people could build (and there were some pretty crazy-good personal sites). But I think even more, I liked that everyone was there because they were either really into the web, or really into some particular topic.
I miss the concept of deep dives. Being able to take them myself, and being able to tag along on other people's, and knowing that there were a vast number of topics where I could be pretty confident that I understood about 85-90% of what could be understood about them at the time.
My golden era was the brief period where I could do ALL of the following well:
- Hardware-build a computer
- Fully program said computer to do anything I wanted it to
- Network my various devices however I wanted
- Access the internet
- Build webpages
- Play arcade, desktop and console games that, in theory, I understood well enough that I could have coded them
- And, let me be really honest, engage in some minor phone phreaking because I was a teenager and that seemed REALLY COOL
And I felt like I understood the totality of most of those things. Which, again, maybe was just due to being a teenager and not knowing what I didn't know, but the size of the domain spaces seemed more manageable.
Now, I spend all day building websites. It's a good job. I can't complain. But I can only build websites. A couple of years ago, for fun, I tried to take a Coursera networking course and I about lost my mind because of how complex I realized it had gotten. My wife is about to start the second year of her Master of Software Engineering degree and I have realized watching her learn Java that there's a whole domain there that I will never be able to understand. Forget understanding how my phone works, and forget the idea of taking apart a Nintendo Switch and putting it back together with mods like I did that classic NES. I probably wouldn't even recognize most of the components.
I sound like I'm sitting in my rocking chair getting ready to yell at the whippersnappers to get off my lawn, don't I?
I'm 37.
Please tell me I'm not the only person to feel this way at this age?
(Edited to add: I am, at least, reassured that I'm not completely alone in this by the quote attributed to physicist Eugene Wigner: "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." Poor Eugene died in 1995 and I feel like he'd have hated the 2000s.)
SUPER grateful for this perspective. My partner and I are both struggling with some ways in which we have been unable to separate from those "it's always been this way so it's always this way" issues. Rather unrelated to the OP, but I found this helpful.
https://technicalpenguins.com is the site for the freelance company I run with my fiance. (See if you can count all the different penguins - our favorites are Lost Penguin for 404s and Plug Penguin for shameless plugs on whitepapers.)
This is wonderful! I love the personality that shines through in your site. In my experience at least, more personality is always better than less personality in freelancing.
http://www.penginsforeveryone.com - giving away stuffed penguins. Just because we can. (Hoping to actually register this as a nonprofit, but right now it's basically a completely unprofitable business venture.)
ETA: On the development end this has been a pretty great project for my fiance and I. He built (and I'm learning from his efforts) a database for processing requests, filtering by priority, etc., and then an integration that allows those we want to send to be exported to a file we can pull into our stamps.com account, and that creates drafts of the Wordpress posts that power our map of sent friends. The database is pretty big (we're sitting at about 21K requests right now on a shared hosting platform) so some of the work has been to load the requests asynchronously so you're not waiting for 21,000 rows before you can manage requests...
Exact same here. I always get weird looks at events/seminars, but I don't care. Huge screen, great price, has run like crazy for me, and does absolutely everything I need.
